The mecca for search marketers are the SMX conferences where they find sessions and training workshops covering all things SEO and SEM related. At the June 2017 SMX Advanced conference held in Seattle, Google’s presentation did not disappoint search marketing gurus.

Google’s Mobile-first Index

The Google presentation included the latest goings-on regarding their Mobile-first Index. Here are a few important summary points:

The switch to Mobile-first Index could take as many as four to five years to completion but is expected to start rolling out in 2018.

A responsive website is preferred by Google within their Mobile-first Index. If your website content is only for the desktop, you would still get indexed but how well you get ranked after the Mobile-first complete launch is another story.

Google is reconfiguring all their page speed metrics to be Mobile-first so we can expect many updates are forthcoming.

Google said that anything longer than a 5 second load time for mobile is too long and you will need to improve site speed to have your website rank well within the new Mobile-first Index.

A new mobile testing tool is under consideration that would allow site owners to see what would change on their site once the Mobile-first Index is launched.

The Link Graph is not working well for mobile so Google said they continue to work on it to see what they can do to make PageRank effectively work on the Mobile Web.

Concentration on a Better User Experience

There were some other important takeaways but all of them, in the end, were to benefit the end user with a better experience:

At Google’s May 2017 keynote, AI-First was the theme but, at SMX Seattle, there were no plans mentioned for machine learning updates coming any time soon but Google Voice Search Analytics is underway.

While there is no exact word count qualifier, websites with word counts of 1536 words or more, rank no.1 and 2 on Google.

If you’re in Ecommerce, you need to optimize your conversion process to be 3 clicks or less for a better user experience

User engagement is still the measuring stick for Google to see how well their algorithms are performing.

Google made a whopping 1,623 algorithmic changes to their index in this past year alone.

Well known SEO consultant, David Mihm, said that when many people get the online conversation about you going, it is most favorable for establishing a strong Local Ranking Factor within Google’s local search algorithm.

Google has no plans to add a new meta tag (allowing publishers to control whether or not their content would be shown) to Featured Snippets and no plans for Featured Snippet Analytics.

Removing old, outdated content that has no traffic might give you a ranking boost. Disney gave a convincing case study to prove this.

Google still frowns upon buying links and is going after the big sites selling them such as Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine. They say not to purchase links as it considers the practice of buying links a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Google will not penalize you if you hide content for a better user experience (UX). Examples include the “read more” and “more” links on your site.

Your hotel booking engine is vital to your online success. We all know the importance of data but what is even more important is that the data you are tracking is correct. Your success hinges on not only the figures in your account but also that the figures you are seeing are accurate.

Most of the Independent and boutique hotels rely on third-party booking engines or third-party vendors for recording bookings and revenue. Unfortunately, sometimes third-party vendors, IT people or web developers don’t take the time to understand proper implementation of the e-commerce code, and this is where we step in to troubleshoot and fix the problem fast.

You’re about to launch a website, and you’ve ensured everything on your end is streamlined and ready to go. You did everything you were supposed to do on your end, including giving the web developer the tracking code for conversions to install. Suddenly, it hits you — it wasn’t anything you did. The tracking code wasn’t installed properly.

After a website goes live, there are numerous possible reasons why the e-commerce conversion code isn’t attributing correctly to the proper channel. Some of the common problems we see with implementation are as follows.

The code is not placed on the correct page.

The code is placed on the correct page but not in the right place of the website. (In header, footer or body tags.)

Additional JavaScript code has been added via the CMS or application delivery infrastructure that may have changed the e-commerce code.

The code is for remarketing in Google AdWords and not the conversion code.

Customization of the code is wrong. (This is a major issue and needs to be resolved by tweaking the code according to the site changes and upgrades.)

Hotel and booking engine website needs are tracked by a customized cross domain tracking code. Implementation of this code is wrong.

The code is placed on the correct page, but is not copied exactly as it should be.

Here is a brief example of when the code is not copied exactly as it should be even though it was placed on the correct page. (Problem number 7).

During our process of routine expert checking, we noticed that the revenue attribution was not flowing correctly in Google Analytics reports. A print shot from the Google Analytics report here shows clearly that the paid search revenue was attributing towards direct traffic.

In the case of this client, the revenue and transaction pattern was attributed to almost 80% direct traffic, 15% paid search traffic and the rest from other sources. (There was only one transaction of $151 revenue before this issue occurred.)

When our experts analyzed the situation in detail, we found out that, while upgrading the booking engine site, the booking engine developer did not exactly copy a very small snippet of the code as it should be (line 46) and it completely brought down the revenue reports data.

The correct code was as follows, which needed the Hotel website name in the [‘ ‘] square brackets, to track the cross domain tracking correctly.

After troubleshooting, the issue was resolved with this correction and the latest Google Analytics report now clearly shows the revenue pattern of 80% and 15% from direct and paid search channels.

Even though it seems like a very small error, it is a time-consuming process to analyze and pinpoint the exact issue from the whole nitty-gritty of website coding. But we at Lodging Interactive have the technology, processes and people in place to monitor and troubleshoot complicated issues.

Through our experts and state of the art technology, the booking engine source code and hotel website are constantly supervised so that information gleaned from website interactions and bookings can help boost ROI and increase bookings. In this way, the client is able to make more informed choices with plenty of information to back up their decisions.

Hotels using Certified PPC Partners such as Google AdWords & Bing Ads can reach new guests in a targeted way and promote direct bookings.

Hotel paid search marketing can sometimes be tricky and especially challenging when setting up PPC campaigns in Google AdWords. If not set-up correctly, your hotel may end up spending thousands of dollars without getting any of the desired results in return.

What is a Google Partner Agency?

At Lodging Interactive we are proud to have a professional on our team that is certified in the use of Google AdWords and Google Analytics. We link our Google AdWords Partner badge directly to our Partner page. But what does it mean to be a badged Google Partner and why is having your hotel work with a Google Partner better?

Google made a Google Partner badge available to advertisers who have passed Google’s criteria as well as have met higher spending and performance requirements. Lodging Interactive has earned this badge by being certified in AdWords, managing a large ad spend every 90 days, and continuously meeting Google’s standards to maintain partner status.

We have also earned specializations in Search and Mobile advertising. This means we are certified in these specific product areas and are well versed in helping clients create and optimize ads for both desktop and mobile.

Why a Google Certified Agency like Lodging Interactive is Just Perfect

Google Certified Analyst: Our dedicated certified manager stays up-to-date with the latest Google AdWords, Google Analytics and YouTube tools as well as algorithm updates by writing and passing Google certification exams every 12 months.PPC Best Practices: To maintain Google Partner status, our agency team member must take certification exams in AdWords Fundamentals, Search, Display, Video, and Mobile Advertising along with Analytics. We follow Google’s standards for account management best practices to maintain our Google Partner badge.

Inside Insights & Features: Partners know what is going on with Google services and products all the time and this gives us valuable insights into the latest trends, events, & inside news in the industry. It also gives us access to Google’s beta features, up to a year or more before they become available to the public, as well as applications in the industry.

Direct Google Access: Google Partners with a large ad spend have a dedicated Google Agency Team that can be contacted any time a client has an issue without waiting in line.

A company that doesn’t continue to maintain Google’s standards for partner status can have their badge removed. This ensures that a high standard of service is maintained no matter the date that the Partner Status was achieved.

Part II – Bing Ads Accredited Professional

Many companies overlook paid search ads on Bing, but they make up a 28.7% share of all searches.

Similar to the Google Partner exam provided by Google, Bing Ads has an Accredited Professional Certification. In order to use Bing Ads on a day-to-day basis, the Bing Ads certification ensures your skills and abilities as a digital marketing and paid search professional are up to date. Like Google, Bing also offers similar benefits for its Accredited Professionals.

Bing constantly creates new and fancy features for your account expansion and improvement. As a Bing Accredited Professional, we join the crew of knowledgeable account executives and PPC experts in the industry.

PARSIPPANY, NJ – April 4, 2017 Lodging Interactive, an award winning digital marketing and social media engagement agency exclusively serving the hospitality industry, today announced the launch of its educational white paper series. The series can be found here: https://lodginginteractive.com/about-us/white-papers/

“Our concept is simply to educate and share relevant hospitality digital marketing information that enables hotel General Managers to make the best informed decisions for their properties,” said Mr. DJ Vallauri, Lodging Interactive’s Founder and CEO. “Each white paper is a brief five pages that can be read online or downloaded as a PDF document. We’ve purposely kept them as short as possible while being meaningful.”

The Company plans to add new white papers bi-weekly. Current Lodging Interactive white papers posted include:

The Future of Hotel Customer Service

Hotel Social Media Marketing Tips

Improving Hotel Guest Experience with Live Chat

Tips for a Successful Hotel Website Redesign

All white papers are free to read and download and do not require email registration. “No email required, although we’d like it very much if you subscribe to our email list,” added Mr. Vallauri.

Headquartered in Parsippany, NJ, Lodging Interactive is a full-service digital marketing and social media engagement agency exclusively servicing the hospitality industry. Through its web design and search optimization division as well as its CoMMingle Social Media Division, Lodging Interactive provides effective Internet marketing services to hundreds of branded and independent properties as well as management companies, restaurants and spas. The company also offers fully managed Live Chat agents for hotel websites through its LiveChatForHotels.com division.

Lodging Interactive is a proud supporter of the Hotel Sales & Marketing Association International (HSMAI) and the company’s president, DJ Vallauri, currently serves on the Board of Directors of HSMAI’s New York Chapter. For more information, please contact sales@lodginginteractive.com, 877-291-4411 or visit the company’s website.

Hotel All Inclusive Digital Marketing Packages

“With the introduction of our all-inclusive digital marketing packages, our innovative approach in hospitality digital marketing continues to evolve,” said Mr. DJ Vallauri, Lodging Interactive’s Founder and President. “For more than fifteen years we have created award winning services for our hospitality clients with our CoMMingle Social Media Marketing Service and most recently our CoMMingle Live Chat Service for hotels leading the pack. Now, we are the only digital marketing agency that brings all the required pieces together into an all-inclusive digital marketing service platform for hotels.”

Hospitality Digital Marketing

“Effective hospitality digital marketing is no longer just about having a new responsive website and launching organic Hotel Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising and a Facebook page,” added Mr. Vallauri. “Today, the smart hotelier understands it takes more of a commitment than this to drive direct hotel bookings.”

A recent 2017 Travel Website Behavior Study showed that consumers, between the ages of 18-34, visit an average of 4.6 unique websites prior to making a hotel reservation. This is down from just a year ago. As a result it has become extremely important for hotels to impress their hotel visitors with personalized and targeting content and live chat support to answer any questions they may have in the booking process.

Lodging Interactive’s all-inclusive digital marketing packages offer hotels the complete solution for a fixed monthly fee. The hotel digital marketing packages are designed to attract qualified visitors, show them personalized and relevant website content, provide real-time human powered live chat support to close the business, ongoing social media engagement and follow-up online reputation management and guest review responses.

Headquartered in Parsippany, NJ, Lodging Interactive is a full-service digital marketing and social media engagement and reputation management agency exclusively servicing the hospitality industry. Through its web design and search optimization division as well as its CoMMingle Social Media Division, Lodging Interactive provides effective Internet marketing services to hundreds of branded and independent properties as well as management companies, restaurants and spas. The company also offers fully managed Live Chat agents for hotel websites through its LiveChatForHotels.com division.

Lodging Interactive is a proud supporter of the Hotel Sales & Marketing Association International (HSMAI) and the company’s president, DJ Vallauri, currently serves on the Board of Directors of HSMAI’s New York Chapter. For more information, please contact sales@lodginginteractive.com, 877-291-4411 or visit the company’s website.

In Episode 53 of the #AskDJV show, DJ Vallauri discusses hotel pay per click budgets. Watch this week’s episode to learn how you can avoid the common pitfalls of other hoteliers.

Video Transcript:

Hotel Pay Per Click Budgets

Hello Everybody and Welcome to the #AskDJV Show, I’m DJ Vallauri this is Episode 53 of the #AskDJV show.

On this week’s episode, I’d like to talk about hoteliers spreading their PPC budget way too thin.

Let me explain:

PPC Cost per Click’s (CPC’s) have increased over the last ten-fifteen years dramatically, yet hotel budgets kind of stay the same for PPC budgets. It’s important that your hotel keeps up with the rising costs of cost per clicks. I remember the day when you could buy a travel related keyword or hotel related keyword for 75 cents. Those days are long gone. That same keyword will now cost you as a hotelier $5, $10, or $15, $20 per click, yet your budget is still operating as if that keyword was 75 cents. So, it’s important when you do your annual budgeting that you increase your PPC marketing allocation to be able to keep up with the trends and the market costs.

Google Pay Per Click

Now, in addition to this, unfortunately, Google, about a year ago, removed the right rail of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). What that means for you, as a hotelier is that there are fewer opportunities for your hotel to actually appear on the PPC results page. Bigger brands, OTA’s, other travel sites are bidding for the same terms you are and now have larger budgets (because they’ve increased accordingly and you haven’t). So, it’s important that you keep up your budgeting. Now hoteliers often come to us and say, “We want to focus not only on our transient campaigns, but we also want to focus on weddings and group business.” Because that’s big in 2017, but the down side is the hotel operators never have enough funds or additional funds to run those wedding and meeting campaigns. So, the result is you’re thinning out your PPC budget even further, you’re watering it down, you’re spreading yourself too thin, as they say, from a marketing perspective you don’t have enough marketing dollars.

Pay Per Click Advertising

So, you need to focus on what you’re going after from a PPC strategy and make sure that you have the right budget allocated for that and your agency can help you determine what that right budget is.

So, I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of the #AskDJV show, be sure to Subscribe down below (the red YouTube button), so that you can stay in touch when new episodes come out on a weekly basis. Thanks for joining us and we’ll see you next week. Take care.

If you have a hotel website the hope is that with each passing year you continue to see an increase in traffic to your site. Unfortunately, this may not always be the case. You may experience a decline in your website traffic year to year and if this is the case, there are a number of things that should be checked that can help determine why the decrease occurred.

Website Traffic Drop Checklist

We’ve put together a list for you of common causes for your hotel website traffic to drop. See if any of these affected your YOY traffic.

Google Knowledge Graph

Perhaps one of the greatest traffic drivers for a hotel website is the Google Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph provides pertinent information about a hotel, as well as a direct link to its website. If your website is not properly linked to the Google Knowledge Graph you can guarantee your traffic will decline. The Google Knowledge Graph is highly visited, so you’ll want to make sure it’s taking users to the right place.

Google Knowledge Graph

Historical Events

How have events in your market differed from year to year? Historical events, like the Pope’s visit to the United States, will increase hotel searches and drive more traffic. However, if your market is not experiencing the same high profile events the following year, then you could potentially see the volume of hotel searches and website visits go down.

Pope Visit to US in 2016 affects overall YOY traffic

Referral Traffic

Are you still linked to the same quality referring websites? Referral traffic may not be the same year to year if you’ve stopped advertising on certain sites or if 3rd party sites sites have dropped you from their listings. In addition, sometimes 3rd party websites go through changes that may affect how traffic to your site is recorded. For example, if they change their page formatting to accordion style, Google will most likely not record the traffic being sent to your site because the search engines have difficulty reading the content on accordion style pages. Be cognizant of the referrers sending traffic to your site. Periodically, check their websites for any changes that could be affecting your traffic.

Losing Quality Backlinks

Hotel Website Design

Along the same lines, how is your hotel website design affecting traffic? If your website has accordion pages or pages with tabs you might be getting traffic to the site, but it may not be recorded, so you will see a change in your traffic numbers year to year. In an instance such as this, it’s important to keep up with Google’s ever-changing algorithms or you may be sabotaging yourself.

Accordion Page Example

New Hotel Competitors

New competition in the market may also affect traffic numbers. With more hotels in the area there are more options for consumers, so traffic may be diverted to the market newcomers. Always be aware of your new “neighbors” and what’s on the horizon, as well. According to NYC & Company, the official Travel & Tourism company for NY, New York City has the nation’s most active hotel development pipeline, with 107,000 hotel rooms in 2016, and a total inventory of 133,000+ rooms expected by the end of 2019.

New Hotel Competitors in NYC

PPC Advertising

Lastly, are you spending money on PPC advertising and if so, are you spending enough? Now that Google has removed the PPC ads from the right side of the search page there is 66% less page real estate available, making the competition for the top ads even greater. With increased competition comes higher keyword costs. If you’re not spending enough for your market or if you are not increasing your budget year to year, your PPC dollars will not be effective. With rising costs each year, as well as new competitors, you have to have the right budget to stay in the game.

In a perfect world you would see a consistent increase in website traffic year after year. However, you can’t count on that happening, but if you are aware of market conditions, have good strategies in place and take the right course of actions, you could greatly increase your chances of avoiding a traffic decline.

Lodging Interactive, an award winning digital marketing and social media engagement agency exclusively serving the hospitality industry, today announced it is offering special Search Engine Marketing (SEM) programs to all BookingSuite hotel customers. It was announced last week, via an email to all hotel members, that BookingSuite would no longer provide SEM services to its member hotels effective January 1, 2017.

“It is an unfortunate position BookingSuite hotel customers find themselves in and confirms that ‘you get what you pay for’ and that there is no cutting corners when it comes to hotel search engine marketing,” stated DJ Vallauri, Lodging Interactive Founder and CEO. “SEM is core to every hotel’s digital marketing plan and our team of SEM experts stand ready to help BookingSuite hotels make a smooth transition.”

Since 2001, Lodging Interactive has exclusively worked with hotels and resorts to maximize online digital revenues opportunities. Clients include small to mid-sized independent properties as well as franchised branded properties representing nearly every brand.

For more information on the special BookingSuite SEM packages please visit: www.hotelSEM.com or call 877-291-4411 ext. 701.

PPC is an ever evolving form of digital advertising that has proven to provide great results if you plan well, monitor your campaigns and spend the appropriate budget each month. It is an especially popular form of advertising for the travel industry. Hotels, in particular can benefit greatly from paid ads, as it gets you easily noticed when potential guests are searching for accommodations. However, in order to be successful, you must have the right strategy in place. This is where a lot of misconceptions about PPC come into play and your PPC advertising can prove to be ineffective if not handled properly. Hotels need to fully understand how PPC works and the repercussions that can occur if it’s mismanaged.

One of the first things you need to decide for your PPC advertising is how much will you allocate to your monthly budget. There are quite a few factors to consider when determining your budget. Some of these include, what market is your hotel in, how many campaigns you will be running, and what the average cost per click is for the keywords you are targeting.

Let’s face it, if your hotel is in a market like Miami or New York City you’re going to need a larger budget than say a hotel in Des Moines or Bismark. Frankly, there just isn’t a comparable volume of searches in these markets and this is one of the first items of consideration.

How many campaigns you’ll run is also an important factor. Hotels will often want to advertise their event space and so that may mean you’ll consider a meeting and/or wedding campaign. This would probably be in addition to a general hotel/location campaign. Depending on your market, there may also be popular local attractions that you’ll want to focus on, which would require yet another campaign. So, keep in mind that your monthly budget needs to be distributed among all running campaigns and you don’t want to stretch that budget too thin because that may lead to having campaigns that don’t have budgets healthy enough to be effective.

In addition to spreading the budget over the number of campaigns you have, you also have to distribute the monthly budget over the 30 days within the month. So, for example, if your monthly budget is $750 and you divide that by 30 days, you have a daily budget of only $25 to spend. Although it may seem that $750 is a large chunk of your advertising budget going toward PPC, in actuality it really isn’t when you break it down to the daily budget. This is where your keyword cost per clicks are going to be very important to understand. Let’s take a market like New York City. As you see in the screen shot below, these are 3 keywords that have very high cost per click rates of $19.90, $18.24, and $22.55. This means that a bid on any of these keywords will decrease your daily budget by the respective price. If the daily budget is $25 then you can only afford to get one click per day with high priced, competitive keywords such as these. It’s important to remember that once you exhaust your daily budget, your ads are no longer shown until the next day when your daily budget replenishes itself. Also, if your budget is only allowing for 1-2 clicks per day, the traffic to your website will be pretty dismal at only 30-60 visits in an entire month!

Keyword

Cost per Click

“boutique hotels new york”

$19.90

+boutique+hotels+in+new+york

$18.24

+nyc+boutique+hotels

$22.55

In a situation like this it would be more appropriate to have a monthly budget in the range of at least $3500-$5000. This will increase the daily budget and allow for more clicks, which leads to more website visits, which leads to more opportunities for bookings.

You will also want to consider seasonality when planning your PPC campaign budget. You will most likely not need the same monthly budget throughout the year. Historically, many markets will see a decrease in traffic during September due to summer coming to an end and families getting into “back to school” mode. This would be a prime example of a month where you may decide to decrease your budget. Whereas, you may want to consider increasing your budget when the winter holiday season begins to approach, as consumer searches tend to be on the rise during this time.

Although a proven effective way to market yourself, there needs to be a full understanding of PPC and the correct campaign management in order to achieve positive results. Taking all of the above factors into consideration, understanding the market and carefully planning your budget, will put you on the right track for success in PPC advertising.

Over the years, we have entered many website competitions for our customers. In episode 49 of the #AskDJV show, we discuss what it truly means for your hotel to win a website award.

After entering and winning numerous website awards and trophies, we have come to find that it really doesn’t help our customers at all. Sure, there’s the prestige of saying that you won an award, but what does it truly bring to you in terms of your bottom line?

We have discussed awards on our website in the past and this week’s episode of the #AskDJV show is sure to shed a whole new light on the meaning of website awards and why we choose to no longer participate in them.

Customer Satisfaction

In the end, it’s all about what makes you, our customers, happy. We feel that you are happier when your bottom line increases – when you see things like:

An overall increase in hotel bookings

Increase in relevant traffic to your property

More F&B Revenue

Greater RFP Submissions

We have decided that we will spend our time and money wiser, making you happy. In the end, it really isn’t about how many awards you’ve won, but how successful we make our customers. Wouldn’t you agree?